Cake Crafts is this little old cake supplies shop in south Denver/Englewood with a classroom upstairs where a group of less than 20 were taught the magic of cake decorating. As I am now, I am slightly amused at the lack of skills I went into my first class with, as I thought I could be one of those self-taught types, that practice was all I would need. But really I knew better, I knew that to be good, I needed the real know-how! Basics. It all starts with the basics. The fundamentals. The first step. What a humbling experience my first course was. With our incredible teacher Helen, our class learned how to bake a cake properly, how to fill our pastry bag so it didn't 'smooge' all over, how to crumb coat and properly frost a cake, how to tell and know the consistency of our frosting for what we were using it for, and then we learned how to pipe. Pipe with all kinds of tips. Stars, and waves and shells and dots and eventually basic flowers and leaves. We decorated cookies, and cupcakes and eventually a couple cakes. Phew, that was a lot to take in! Helen felt that we should learn early how to pipe a rose (which is taught in the second course). If you haven't piped more than 100 roses, Helen made sure you piped at least 5 more for her, as practice made perfect! The joy of learning from Helen was that once we became her students, we became privy to her 'secret' recipes. Secret enough that some students take courses with her just to obtain those recipes! As a class, we all took notes when she let out her secret tips and tricks of the trade! For our final, we baked and frosted our second cake. We had a basic design to follow of making a spray of roses, and I was happy with my cake in the end. I wish I had a picture of one of my cakes we had to make with a puffy frosting cupcake design...that one was funny looking to me. But it sure tasted wonderful!
...my cupcakes: grass tip with little bugs, a yellow mum flower, a purple 'pom-pom' (which we all agreed was nothing close to a pom-pom), a white drop flower, and one of my first buttercream roses...
...my first fondant looking buttercream frosted cakes, with drop flowers and piped leaves, with a yellow shell boarder...
...a better look at my shell boarder...
...the cake we decorated for our Final. Buttercream roses and a pearl boarder...
...we had to pipe some form of wording, and I had run out of time, thus the simple 'Hi'...
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